Piggybacking on an Autonomous Hauler: Business Models Enabling a System-of-Systems Approach to Mapping an Underground Mine

With ever-increasing productivity targets in mining operations, there is a growing interest in mining automation. In future mines, remote-controlled and autonomous haulers will operate underground guided by LiDAR sensors. We envision reusing LiDAR measurements to maintain accurate mine maps that would contribute to both safety and productivity. Extrapolating from a pilot project on reliable wireless communication in Boliden's Kankberg mine, we propose establishing a system-of-systems (SoS) with LIDAR-equipped haulers and existing mapping solutions as constituent systems. SoS requirements engineering inevitably adds a political layer, as independent actors are stakeholders both on the system and SoS levels. We present four SoS scenarios representing different business models, discussing how development and operations could be distributed among Boliden and external stakeholders, e.g., the vehicle suppliers, the hauling company, and the developers of the mapping software. Based on eight key variation points, we compare the four scenarios from both technical and business perspectives. Finally, we validate our findings in a seminar with participants from the relevant stakeholders. We conclude that to determine which scenario is the most promising for Boliden, trade-offs regarding control, costs, risks, and innovation must be carefully evaluated.Comment: Preprint of industry track paper accepted for the 25th IEEE International Conference on Requirements Engineering (RE'17

The role of gender in students’ ratings of teaching quality in computer science and environmental engineering

Students’ ratings of teaching quality on course units in computer science and environmental engineering at a large Swedish university were obtained using the Course Experience Questionnaire; 8,888 sets of ratings were obtained from men and 4,280 sets were obtained from women over ten academic years. There were differences in the ratings given by students taking the two programs; in particular, teachers tended to receive higher ratings in subjects that were less typical for their gender than in subjects that were more typical for their gender. There were differences in the ratings given to male and female teachers, differences in the ratings given by male and female students, and interactions between these two effects. There was no systematic trend for students to give different ratings to teachers of the same gender as themselves compared with teachers of the other gender. Nevertheless, without exception even the statistically significant effects were small in magnitude and unlikely to be of theoretical or practical importance. It is concluded that the causes of differences in the career progression of male and female teachers in engineering education need to be sought elsewhere.   

Trade and ethnozoological use of African lorisiformes in the last 20 years

Trade in primates is considered a major impediment to primate conservation globally. The bushmeat trade in West and Central Africa is considered largely unsustainable and represents one of the main threats to biodiversity. Furthermore, the use of primates in traditional practices and medicine includes a third of the African primate species. Little is known about the trade in the African mainland lorisiforms; pottos, angwantibos and galagos. Aiming to fill this knowledge gap we created an online survey, conducted a literature review, and analyzed CITES trade records, focusing on the last two decades. We obtained 188 questionnaire responses from researchers and people working in 31 different countries in sub-Saharan Africa. We found a total of 33 publications reporting on trade in African lorisiforms, and CITES records indicate that almost 2000 lorisiforms were traded internationally from African range countries. Fifty-three percent of respondents provided meaningful details about aspects of the trade in African lorisiforms from 50% of the range countries. Galagos were reported by respondents in larger numbers than pottos and angwantibos, and mainly occurred in the pet trade. Pottos were the most frequently mentioned taxon in the literature, when all trade types were combined. Across all of the sources (online survey, literature and CITES database), trade in pottos and angwantibos was reported from 12 countries, and galagos from 23 countries. Trade was reported to occur mainly within rural settings (64%), potentially indicating that demand is not high enough to fuel long distance trading. However, as seen in the Asian lorisiforms, once quantitative studies were conducted, the threat that trade posed became alarmingly apparent and is now considered a major impediment to their conservation. Our insight into the trade of African lorisiforms should be followed up with concerted studies, with an emphasis on quantifying trade to the species level

Harmonic maps into the exceptional symmetric space G2/SO(4)G_2/SO(4)

We show that a harmonic map from a Riemann surface into the exceptional symmetric space $G_2/{\mathrm SO}(4)$ has a $J_2$-holomorphic twistor lift into one of the three flag manifolds of $G_2$ if and only if it is `nilconformal', i.e., has nilpotent derivative. Then we find relationships with almost complex maps from a surface into the 6-sphere; this enables us to construct examples of nilconformal harmonic maps into $G_2/{\mathrm SO}(4)$ which are not of finite uniton number, and which have lifts into any of the three twistor spaces. Harmonic maps of finite uniton number are all nilconformal; for such maps, we show that our lifts can be constructed explicitly from extended solutions.Comment: Final section added with some Lie-theoretic proofs. The rest of the paper slightly shortene

Transparency and Credibility: Monetary Policy with Unobservable Goals

We define and study transparency, credibility, and reputation in a model where the central bank's characteristics are unobservable to the private sector and are inferred from the policy outcome. A low-credibility bank optimally conducts a more inflationary policy than a high-credibility bank, in the sense that it induces higher inflation, but a less expansionary policy in the sense that it induces lower inflation and employment than expected. Increased transparency makes the bank's reputation and credibility more sensitive to its actions. This has a moderating influence on the bank's policy. Full transparency of the central bank's intentions is generally socially beneficial, but frequently not in the interest of the bank. Somewhat paradoxically, direct observability of idiosyncratic central bank goals removes the moderating incentive on the bank and leads to the worst equilibrium.Monetary Policy; transparency; credibility

Bayesian Linear Regression on Deep Representations

A simple approach to obtaining uncertainty-aware neural networks for regression is to do Bayesian linear regression (BLR) on the representation from the last hidden layer. Recent work [Riquelme et al., 2018, Azizzadenesheli et al., 2018] indicates that the method is promising, though it has been limited to homoscedastic noise. In this paper, we propose a novel variation that enables the method to flexibly model heteroscedastic noise. The method is benchmarked against two prominent alternative methods on a set of standard datasets, and finally evaluated as an uncertainty-aware model in model-based reinforcement learning. Our experiments indicate that the method is competitive with standard ensembling, and ensembles of BLR outperforms the methods we compared to.Comment: 4th workshop on Bayesian Deep Learning (NeurIPS 2019), Vancouver, Canad

Epidemiologic studies on rheumatic muscle inflammation, myositis

Observational study designs are often used in medical research. Swedish national registers have successfully been used as data sources for such observational studies in other rheumatic diseases. The Swedish health care system is tax funded and does together with the ability to link multiple national registers, allowing for longitudinal follow-up, make up a great setting for answering many research questions in a real world setting. We identified 95 patients with idiopathic inflammatory myopathies (IIM) treated with different biologic therapies between 2000 and 2011 in study 1. All had previously been treated with prednisolone and at least one Disease modifying anti-rheumatic drug (DMARD). Rituximab was the most commonly used drug and even though large variations were seen in treatment length, no conclusions could be made regarding effectiveness. Between 2007 and 2011 we found an average incidence rate of 11 per 1 000 000 person-years for IIM in Sweden in study 2. We observed a general increase in incidence with age and a peak was observed in the 50-79 year age groups and the highest incidence rate was in the 70-79 year age group. No difference in incidence was observed for different levels of education or population density and even though large variations were seen between Sweden´s 21 counties, no north to south gradient was observed. In study 3 we conducted a case-control study with IIM as the outcome and respiratory diseases and infections as the exposure. Previous infections were associated with increased future risk to develop IIM, OR 1.5. The risk was elevated for both infections of the respiratory tract and gastrointestinal tract but not for infections of the skin. Respiratory diseases were less common than infections but the relative risk was higher, odds ratio (OR) 2.3, and was elevated for both upper and lower respiratory tract diseases. A dose-response relationship between number of visits indicating exposure increased the risk of IIM for both respiratory diseases and infections. In Study 4 we used a cohort study design to address if the risk of stroke is increased following IIM diagnosis. We identified 663 newly diagnosed IIM patients and 6673 general population comparators without prior stroke or stroke-related events. We found an increased risk of both ischemic and haemorrhagic stroke (HS), hazard ratio (HR) 1.7 and 2.3 respectively. Because the number of HS were rare we did not further analyse this outcome. For IS, the rate differences were the highest in the oldest age group (≥68) and in men relative risk of IS was highest in the youngest age group (<56 years). When accounting for the competing risk of death, the HR for IS was decreased by 40% and the cumulative incidence was increased in IIM patients compared to the general population directly following diagnosis but they were similar after 10 years

Bilder av Ryssland: Annorlundahet och misstro i samtida svensk Rysslandsdiskurs

This thesis analyzes contemporary Swedish discourse on Russia, i.e. the ways Russia and Russians are perceived in Sweden today. After a summary of historical Western and Swedish perceptions of Russia, and a discussion about the treatment of these tensions within modern research, contemporary Swedish discourse is reconstructed based upon analytical articles in three major newspapers during the period 1992-2007. It is argued that the prevailing image of Russia contains the reproduction of old stereotypes and prejudices. The five major representations of Russia in contemporary Swedish discourse are: non-Western, unreliable, authoritarian, threatening and eternal, with the last one being a meta-representation functioning both as a representation of its own and a mechanism for the reification of the others. This discoursive chain of equivalence is tantamount to a mental journey, which starts with the construction of Russia as an enigma, and ends in pure enmity. Finally, the importance of non-biased analysis is stressed, especially in - and not in spite of - times of tensions vis-à-vis the Russian regime